Saturday, July 05, 2008

Australian Prime Minister Denounces Photo

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has weighed in on the photo of the nude 6 year-old girl on the cover of Art Monthly Australia.
"How can anyone assume that a little child of six years old, eight, 10, 12, somehow is able to make that decision for themselves," he said.

"I mean I don't think I can [assume that] - that's just my view and that's why frankly I can't stand this stuff."
A child abuse campaigner supports the Prime Minister.
"I have to say, in my 11 years of campaigning on this issue I've never been more prouder of this country than I am in listening to what the Prime Minister has to say.

"Nor have I felt more confident around the direction in which Australia is going around the protection of children."
This has nothing to do with "protecting" children. This is about fully-grown adults who apparently have lost their senses. With all the hysteria over child predators and child pornography, it's no wonder that politicians take the easy way out and go along with these activist groups who are blinded by their passion for something they don't really understand. These people are trying to take children and just throw them in a closet, keep them off the beaches, out of art museums, cinema, magazines, and all aspects of popular art and culture.

These fanatics are taking the human body, which is a thing of wonder, and making it something to be ashamed of, something to criminalize, to prosecute, and to ruin lives with.

Sure there are predators out there, but they can be found in churches, schools, scouting, and just about everywhere children can be found. Wrapping children up in brown paper bags is not the way to address the problem. Children have brains, talk to them and warn them about talking to strangers. Talk to them about not letting people touch their bodies. Educate your children, don't hide them away.

Where does it stop? Parents are being hauled into jail and having their kids taken away because some bare-bottomed photos show up at WalMart. And now the news media is so skittish over this whole phenomenon that they are censoring an image that needs no censoring, that contains nothing erotic or offensive, that is just the beautiful rendering of an innocent child.

The camera cannot take away innocence. That power is in the eye of the beholder. Anyone who can look at this Australian magazine cover and see something other than a beautiful little girl is no better than Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s who thought everyone he saw was a Communist. It's mass hysteria, it's delusion, it's a witch hunt.

Everyone should read Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" because that play applies to this situation. Miller's drama set during the Salem Witch Trials recounts a society's excessive zeal and disregard for the individual to stamp out a perceived social ill. Merely pointing at someone and calling them a witch does not make that person a witch; calling the Australian magazine cover pornography does not make it pornography. But if enough people rise up in false indignation and blind rage, then irrationality and ignorance will reign.

I'm sorry, but this really pisses me off. I really don't understand how people can be so narrow-minded and paranoid.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments: